ROSE FORAN

what now?

Sat, 19 May 2012 16:39:00 +0200

I have ten days until there will be twenty-five minutes that stand between me and my master’s degree.

I’m eating a lot of kimchi these days and dreaming of packing up and going to Asia so I can find someone’s grandmother to teach me how to put love into the spices of her history. I dream of packing up and going to war. I think about when I’m finally going to give into my recklessness, betray my restraint: disappoint people who worry about me but give others who don’t as much some vicarious excitement. I dream of what it would be like to be covered in ants. I think of the smoky sweet taste of eel that won’t leave my tongue, the kind of bellowing flavor that might drive me to give everything up, just to chase it back to its roots.

Sometimes conversations with people which turn briefly to their thoughts on my writing keep me going, but then it all seems to be too much and I have a glass of wine and then I’m less agitated and a bit more lethargic and I lose the gnawing compulsion to continue on with another sentence.

Sometimes I let the sink leak so I can hear it drip while my mind grows dull.

My favorite chair is broken, so I’m writing in a different chair than I usually do, one that I stole at 3am from a café and walked with it across the Seine back to my apartment. A man in a car stopped to tell me that he saw me take it, but I laughed it off because I knew he was just jerking me around because he knew I had a bit to drink; I think this is the only reason someone would steal a chair from the side of the street and traverse a city with it on their back. This chair is broken, too, but it forces you to lean back on it and it sustains you despite the weariness of its construction, and it seems as if it can never fully collapse. My favorite chair is broken in a way that now whenever I sit on it with purpose it pinches my rear, as if to tell me to forgo my sentimental attachment, to throw it away finally and buy another one or buy an exact replica for just thirty euros. I’ll pass by the store where I bought it, and sometimes I go in, but I never make it to the second floor where I saw it for the first time and knew it would be a white, modern juxtaposition to the second-hand table that I’d like to think is made of oak. Half of me is afraid it won’t be there anymore, half of me is compelled to get back to that place of drunken, euphoric mischief so I can steal another one.

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“Yo Rose, you know what I think we should do? Make this...

Mon, 14 May 2012 02:50:02 +0200

“Yo Rose, you know what I think we should do? Make this place our own state. Have diplomatic relations with France.” -In which two best friends embark on their last exam together after 5 years of higher education.

from my grandfather’s desk

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 12:42:43 +0200

from my grandfather’s desk

I bitch and complain about papers and studying war and grad...

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 14:54:00 +0200

I bitch and complain about papers and studying war and grad school in general, but small moments come along like this one - as I crossed the Seine this morning - that remind me that this very well might be the happiest time of my life.

On a creative hiatus for the next few weeks. Until then,...

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 05:13:00 +0200

On a creative hiatus for the next few weeks. Until then, remember me with a tambourine in hand singing Ruby Tuesday.

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god and me

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 18:24:00 +0200

“To: God Love: Rose” was the first piece of art I remember making. It was comprised of my favorite cat sticker, which I had been saving until I found the right vessel to adorn, along with a few heart stickers I don’t think I cared much about because I had a whole sheet of them, which God probably knew, so I was generous with them, as an offering. I drew swirls around the cat, to indicate to God that this was my ultimate sacrifice, my Isaac-waiting-on-a-lamb. I also remember including a small drawing of a house, in addition to a rudimentary depiction of myself, albeit with longer hair: I did, however, make sure to use yellow marker because I was much blonder back then, just in case God got me mixed up with someone else.

My fervently religious babysitter Maria used to tell me that sharing was important, that Jesus said when you have two you should give one away – something I think I consciously ignored because she talked about Jesus more than I was comfortable with (adults looked over my religious contention and instead called this “selfishness”). One day when I was about ten we held a theological summit on the issue, from which we determined that when we talked about Jesus we would talk about him in the context of Just Being a Really Nice Guy without any imposing messianic undertones.

Maria believed in black magic. She also told me that I was special and I was probably a prophet, which meant that I could talk to God and he would talk back to me, but we would have to see until I got my period to know for sure. I was thrilled at this prediction, mostly because of the favors God might do for me if it turned out to be true: I made a note to myself to not ask for much during my impending adolescence so he could get me into Stanford University when I would be seventeen. I painted vivid canvasses of Rose Foran, ten-year-old prophet, in my head, which were a melange of symbolism gleaned from illustrated versions of the Old Testament as well as a more fantastical set of mental images I took from the books I read about dragons and mythical elves.

I believed in God until I stopped believing in God, either suddenly or in a thoughtless pale. The realization landed concretely in my awareness in what should have been the most spiritual moment of my life – my bat mitzvah – where I stood in front of a congregation and chanted a passage from the Torah that was rather banal, about laws relating to pilgrimage and sacrifice while the Jews were wandering in the desert. I couldn’t help but think back to the sacrifice of my cat sticker and feel a visceral missing of that pulling to God, of which I sadly – or maybe not so sadly – could no longer conceive.

I was only half-expecting him to be there but I was disappointed when he didn’t turn up – even though in retrospect I’m not sure what kind of sensation of knowing I anticipated: perhaps it was the booming voice of Morgan Freeman coming from the heavens or a slight, aging man with tortoise-shell glasses who would be sitting in the back row, nodding at me during the Shma –I always peek out at the crowd even though you’re supposed to say it with eyes closed, in intense contemplation – who would then disappear suddenly in a flash of white light.

But the service was unremarkable, spiritually at least, and I quietly concluded that I gave my best shot at believing: I was thirteen after all – a woman by Biblical standards – I menstruated and shaved my legs on occasion and wore white cotton training bras from the Gap. As per Maria’s prediction, this should have been the time when I finally heard back from God: when I would receive instruction as Moses did about how I should proceed in life as a Special Person, but I was left waiting in cosmic silence.

I decided this conviction would be left unexpressed for as long as possible, the way I hold certain feelings in a simmering cauldron in an elaborately-concealed corner so they can ruminate for a bit, so I can let them gestate in tranquility until they are ready to meet my acceptance, fully formed.

But when I was fourteen, on the way home from a swim meet, I told Maria that I didn’t believe in God anymore – the first time I had ever set my feelings to language. She pulled over to the side of the road in a fury I don’t think I had ever before seen in her – as if I told her I had spent the afternoon freebasing heroin or selling my body to pay for snacks at my middle school’s vending machine. She said that at that moment she saw the devil in me, that he had taken me over because he knew I was special, and, at that very moment, she wasn’t sure if she loved me anymore.

As absurd as my relationship with Maria might appear, at least with these paltry descriptions – it seemed at the time, to her at least, as if the fate of humanity rested on my believing. Granted, these were delusions that even a mature fourteen-year-old couldn’t persuade otherwise, but they still lodged a profound sense of guilt where her promises of prophecy used to be.

In the years following my minivan confession, I was consumed with the prospect of my own inevitable expiration, angry at my helpless doubts, cognizant of the fact that my budding anxiety issues would have been significantly mitigated if I put faith in a benevolent force greater than me. The day I admitted my reluctant belief (or lack thereof) I stopped sleeping soundly, needing to listen to the radio throughout the night – the reassuring sounds of human voices – in order to quell my rolling terror of feeling so alone in the world.

But then one day I found God again in a backstreet in the Old City of Jerusalem when I gave a lost Russian girl directions in Hebrew, a language I knew previously in both its ancient and modern incarnations, once ever-present in my consciousness like songs that meander in the back of your mind when you do the dishes.

My comprehension of Hebrew is akin to a sensation in which, after being kidnapped as an infant, you hear your mother tongue being whispered in your ear only in your deepest sleep. It’s a vague understanding I’ve been able to maintain despite large gaps of silence, with my sloppy utterances that take on a lubricated delivery only when I order falafel or a strong cup of coffee.

The girl seemed disoriented and intimidated by the pushy vendors of the quilted bazaar, and said that her parents back in Moscow would be horrified if they knew she was walking alone in a strange land, especially “among so many men.” I told her I would help her get back to the Jaffa Gate, and she embraced me like I’ve never been hugged before – as if perhaps I was a divine gift resulting from her frantic prayers.

Along the way back to the Jaffa Gate we wandered through a technicolor morass of slow-moving tourists and half-hearted catcalls and young soldiers with M-16s held closely to their abdomens. Hardened children carried behemoth carts filled with their parents’ wares, and they did not say thank you or smile when I helped recover scattered boxes as they toppled to the cobblestone.

The Russian girl said to me in broken Hebrew that she admired how I seemed to convey to them an element of sternness while expressing kindness in my eyes – a generous translation – to which I replied (an equally generous translation) that hopefully someday it might make me a half-decent mother.

We arrived, finally, at Jaffa Gate – a route that I now know by heart from anywhere in the Old City, as I’ve been lost in its darkest corners too many times, alone, in unfriendly hours of the night. She hugged me again, and said “todah rabah…” until she ran out of breath, which at that moment meant so much more than “thank you,” just as my “bevakasha” meant universes beyond “you’re welcome.”

It was in the pervading smile that stuck to my face, filling the rest of my day with warmth even in the cool breeze of the Jerusalem night, that I felt something close to my memory of God pulling at me again.

It is said that learning to be happy is mostly about managing expectations, and I think that it was from the same logic I re-learned to believe in God: not as a grandiose production or whatever crazy vision of a teenage prophet Maria had of me somewhere in between her black magic and Catholic convictions, or even within the confines of religion itself.

God speaks to me in my unwavering amusement with the world, and I believe in God because even though I can’t sing I have a nice chanting voice and I can’t write poetry but I can create trembling melodies in prose.

I think I hear notes of God in the way that I feel when I wake up to see sunlight dancing on my jasmine plant, and somewhere in the depths of my whirling cynicism I have this child-like feeling that God likes to see me smile, which might be the very definition of faith itself.

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spring, part 1

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 02:48:00 +0200

“It’s hard to explain,” I began, as I often do – insecure about my inability to tell stories out loud, self-conscious about my difficulties in reconciling speech with the rapid movements that occur in the interwoven system of hamster-cage plastic tubing I imagine sometimes to be my brain.

“I was born in March…”
“What day in March?”
“March 9^th.”
“So the beginning?”

“Yes, the beginning of March. So it’s always the in-between season – just getting out of winter, and especially since I haven’t lived in Los Angeles for so long, I just feel this heaviness, you know? And I hate my birthday – I know that there are a lot of people who say they do, but I really do – in the weeks leading up to it, in February, I get this feeling that all of the toxins, or, I don’t know, pollution of all the year keeps accumulating and accumulating and when it comes to the end of winter I feel like I’m so heavy that I’m just going to die. And then my birthday is sort of the culmination of all of it, when I’m so aware of everything – all of the emotional grime from the year and the heaviness of it all – it’s always the worst day, but then the next day…” I took a breath.

I became aware that I had lost control of my usual gesticulations when I’m speaking about my feelings in the abstract to someone who seems to care, and saw that my hand had somehow made its way about six inches above my head: just floating there, frozen in a claw-shape. I assumed that it had achieved this height from a series of rolling movements, to mirror the frantic rhythm of my monologue, like a balancing plate dance that an elementary school classmate’s mother of mine did once for a show-and-tell: I can never remember if she was French or Japanese or Moroccan. I just remember her beauty and her ascending hand: contorted elegantly to balance a ceramic plate, bringing it about her body – showing it to every line, every curve, finally raising it above her head before its cathartic descent.

I brought my hand back into my lap, and focused its nervous tension on my set of three ‘worry rings,’ which are intertwined such I can slide them up and down the middle finger of my right hand easily, when I need to distract myself. My fingers are so large, so square and gracelessly formed that I take any ring that can flatter them as a sign from God. I bought them at the height of this aforementioned Heaviness, four days before my birthday.

I started again.

“And so the next day, I just feel better. I feel light and relieved, as if I survived a mudslide or something and I’m just coming out of a warm bath. The best bath of your life, you know what I mean? And I open my eyes the day after, and suddenly, there it is – the first hint of spring.”

Silence ensued, not out of discomfort, but out of the warmth of two people who are trying to figure themselves into the other’s ebbs. We stared at each other for a short few seconds, and then the professor smiled and began to tell me about the first moment he felt as if he was no longer young.

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fresh air (an unedited diary entry from the diary i don't keep)

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:20:00 +0100

I haven’t gone to class since Monday morning, which is unusual for me because I like the structure of it – the reason to wake up, the rushing and panic that comes with the revelation that being a few minutes late or a few minutes on early is just a matter of hustle and the luck of meeting the right traffic signals. But I’ve had a meandering suspicion that I’ve been going mad from the ghosts of impending deadlines that sit on my shoulders like cinder blocks, and I’ve been needing to hide out in my little nest and make-believe, for this brief period, that the fantasy cave I’ve fashioned out of my tree-house apartment is a mental island retreat and I won’t emerge until I’m whole again.

I like routine. I’m a morning person, I think. I function better when surrounded by sunlight, or even the slightest hint of it: I like to wake up with the rolling movements of an emerging Paris, the ascending noise levels of the garbage trucks, delivery trucks, my upstairs neighbors and their bizarre tastes in bass-heavy disco music and their equally bizarre penchant for moving furniture around at odd hours of the day. I listen to jazz on the radio and make coffee and oatmeal and eat it so quickly that it warms my insides with the threat of setting them ablaze.

Amid my retreat of radio silence, I saw my hairdresser, Seb, yesterday. I went outside and the air was soft. The world was gentle with me and I looked back into the yawning sky with gratitude.

The rendezvous was much needed, seeing that I’ve spent the last 3 months in the painstaking, perpetually bobby-pinned process of growing out the bowl cut he replicated from a picture I brought to him of me as a somber 4-year-old. In retrospect, we both agreed that it was in response to some deep-seated emotional crisis: “Le retour à l’enfance,” he told me, in mock-diagnosis, “always a sign that something else is going on.”

I was especially looking forward to seeing Seb also because he’s grown to be, after almost two years of knowing each other, not only a friend, but more importantly, a confidant: the way we are with one another is the very thing that made me understand the meaning of the term.

Maybe it’s a symptom of not having seen a therapist regularly in three years – the longest period in my adult life I’ve gone without Professional Council – but I always prepare a resume my of life since the last time I’ve seen him: the kind of last-minute emotional inventory I did in college, albeit now recited in advance to myself in French so I can fully take advantage of him as a sounding board, so he can understand the nuances of my stories and dilemmas in the way they take form in the back corners of my mind.

Usually I start with my everythings, but this time I could tell that he was happier, brighter than he had been since he started growing his now massive beard in summer, before I left for Singapore – and I wanted to hear his recitation of events before I dove into mine.

“You know, we’re artists,” he tells me, as if to stake claim to some kind of secret nationality. “We see beauty in things, like all of this,” he pointed at the abstract installation hanging from the ceiling, which changes every few months.

He told me a story about an old colleague who passed by a few weeks prior; she wanted to take inspiration from the way he decorated his salon. “But she didn’t see it the way you or I see it. You see what I’m trying to say?”

Seb and I always arrive at some grandiose conclusion at the end of our sessions, which always run over the allotted time because I think the rhythms of our conversation dictate the way he cuts my hair on a given day. Yesterday we laughed and laughed: there was warmth and clarity that outlined our images as we looked at each other in the mirror, smiling into the facilitator for our indirect eye contact.

Yesterday we decided that change is good. Shocks to the system make us open our eyes wider, to extents more gaping than we could have ever imagined.

“What should we do today,” he asked me when I sat down in his coiffeur’s chair. “Something fresh,” I said. “Fresh,” he replied, “Fresh, for spring. Let’s go.”

I’m twenty-three now, 23!

“Twenty-three” I say to myself when I’m getting ready to leave my apartment, the way I say “Rose Foran” to the mirror sometimes, to remind myself that life is short, but it is also long: long in the sense that I’m stuck with the person who looks back at me for as long as there is someone to look into it.

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the vegetable men

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 17:09:00 +0100

I am involved in a love triangle.

Ignore the tawdry images this inspires in your imagination; it’s really nothing like that. It involves two people, neither of whom I know by name, who sell me fresh produce and are perhaps a more frequent presence in my life in Paris than many of my close friends.

I recently completed my first piece of food writing for An Esteemed Internet Publication, which is currently in the editing stage, and hopefully you’ll see it on the web soon. The conversations I’ve had because of it with my very insightful and talented editor (Shout-out to Francis Lam) about food in general and food writing in particular have made me completely rethink the way I consider food as a part of my life, and even more within the context of writing about it.

I never considered actually writing about food before, despite the fact that eating is indubitably my favorite part about being a human person on planet Earth, and the litmus test for all of my close friendships is the essential question: if you had to decide between only good sex and only good food for the rest of your life, what would you choose? The answer to me is a no-brainer. I do not associate with anyone who thinks differently. Sure, I grunt indistinguishable exaltations when I’m in a euphoric mid-burger state after chasing around Le Camion Qui Fume, Paris’ first food-truck, or do a little dance whenever I’m about to get a burrito from El Nopal, but I never really thought I could put such an experience into words besides, “Oh…my…God…” or “Mrrrahhh, so… good.”

The trick to food writing, or so I’d like to tell myself as I attempt to edit this piece – in the hope it will eventually turn into something worthy of an audience besides my mother or the friends I force to read my blog while I look dutifully over their shoulder (and, well, compensation) – is that you have to consider the experience surrounding food in order to truly appreciate the final product as it hits your palette.

To me, food is laughter. Food is the assembly line of experiences that encompass tradition and stories and culture. Food is joy and friendship and someone giving a damn about what goes into your body to make it function and into your soul to bring you pleasure. But if you had to separate the experiences of the joy and the laughter and the personal connection with the person who brings it you, and the food itself, as a singular product – where would you stand?

And thus, my friends, is the central dilemma in my love triangle with the Vegetable Men.

I live in the Marais, an area of Paris that speaks to my artistic side – which is to say that nothing about life here is pragmatic: I pay an inordinate amount of money for a studio apartment that should be about a room and a half bigger (but really, don’t we all), nearly all of the attractive men in the neighborhood are gay, and it takes a shorter amount of time for me to access all the olive chutney I could ever dream of than it does public transportation.

But then again, I have the privilege of living a two-minute walk away from the Marché des Enfants Rouges, which is nestled in a little pocket on rue de Bretagne: a street that is the very heart of the 3^rd arrondissement of Paris.

The Marché des Enfants Rouges is magic.

It is home to all of the neighborhood’s most fabled characters (with the exception of the new guard of the 3ème on rue Dupuis whom I would be remiss not to mention: Seb, the coiffeur at Messieurs-Dames, Merce of Merce and the Muse – and Mary, who makes the world’s best gelato and speaks Italian exclusively and shamelessly, much to the bewilderment of her French customers).

There is my flower guy who looks vaguely like an aging, white version Jimmy Hendrix, who quizzes me on what kind of music I listen to when I’m waiting for him to cut my roses – always astonished when he is reminded that I don’t particularly care for Led Zeppelin.

Then there is the mythical boulanger and sandwich-man extraordinaire Alain, who, whenever I say bonjour in passing, always responds with an emphatic Hello! – sometimes accompanied by ma poulette: a term of endearment I’d like to think is a nod to the fact that we do indeed know each other outside the context of the market. While he’s seen me around his sandwich stand with some of the boys I’ve known and always asks after the most handsome of them – Alain and I often collide on Sunday nights at La Perle when it’s not too crowded, or, more often than he’d like to admit, around hidden corners of the Marais in the early hours of the morning when we’re both on our way home from a night out.

And then there is the vegetable stand.

A considerable number of the stations in the marché are run by a Lebanese family, who are as lovely as can be and really turn the atmosphere into a family affair come the weekend – their eight year old daughter takes orders, hands out change, and they let their mild-mannered dog roam around the labyrinth of stalls when it’s not too chaotic.

They leave the produce station to be run by their son, who can’t be older than 20, who is small and quick, whose eyes exude kindness. He is gentle with me when I am hung over on a crowded Sunday, fumbling through my seemingly-endless bagfuls of fruits and vegetables – and takes it upon himself to delicately pack my little shopping trolley, always giving me a little gift of parsley or basil or an extra lemon, to be placed on the top of the load, for good measure. We address each other in the tu form, and I’d like to think of him as a kind of friend – despite the unfortunate fact that we don’t really know anything about each other, something that I should make an effort to change. Seeing him always makes me smile, because he pauses during the hectic run-around of the perimeters of his stand while serving the demanding older women to say hello and ça va, in an un-perfunctory manner: like he means it. And we always let each other know that it is a pleasure to see the other. I am very fond of him.

But there is another vegetable man in my life.

If you exit the universe of the Marché des Enfants Rouges, further along the rue de Bretagne: between my favorite neighborhood bar, Le Progrès, and rue Saintonge, there lies a fruit and vegetable market aptly named Le Jardin du Marais.

Le Jardin du Marais is run by an impossibly efficient husband-and-wife pair, who sell produce of the highest quality: the kind of stuff you can swear by and pick at and savor for days. But the atmosphere is hurried. There is a very strict protocol to the process of purchasing their wares: the bohemian-bourgeois arrive at the shop’s entrance and line up, patiently, with their wicker baskets or trolleys better fortified than mine - which I got from Ikea - and are served. There is an interdiction on meandering, which is unfortunate because the produce is displayed so ornately that it makes you just want to repeat the phrase “God’s green earth” over and over until you can really appreciate this spectacle, brought to you by Nature.

At Le Jardin du Marais you are supposed to know what you want before you arrive: brussel sprouts for how many people, three avocados - “For when?” “We’ll eat them in two days” - five peppers, one green and four red. I wouldn’t say that the environment is sterile; on the contrary, it is bursting with crunchy sunlight and subtle sweetness and the right kinds of bitter. But it is a shrine to the greenest Granny Smith, the waxy aubergine. You are a guest in this place and you act accordingly.

I was there one Thursday afternoon between classes, when I knew it wouldn’t be too crowded, and when it was my turn to sound off my week’s order of choice produce, I told the man that I wanted a pineapple.

“Which kind?”

“I don’t know, the best one, I guess.”

“Ah, I have the right one for you. When will you have it?”

“Tomorrow?”

And then with much pride, he called me over to where the pineapples rested so elegantly, stacked in such a way that none of them was hidden behind the other - and he just said, “Cameroon.”

So we shared this intimate moment over a pineapple from Cameroon, which he took to his nose and smelled it all in, and then gave to me to smell, as if to explain to me that this very experience embodied everything he is - and then we smelled it together, nodding in unison. “Incroyable,” I said. It was, it smelled, incredible.

“For tomorrow,” he said, “it will be perfect tomorrow.”

But I forgot to tell him that I like fruits only when they bend against the edge of ripeness – when they are at the peak of sour, when you bite into them and they shriek “Not yet, not yet! Save me for later,” which is something the boy from the Marché knows by now after having spent weeks of specifying “pas trop mûr” for my nectarines when they are in season.

I saved it for the next day, as instructed, and it was too sweet for me.

So what is the right experience of food? Is it the Marché in all its convivial spirit or the Jardin, who gives you the kind of stuff to marvel at - the veg of kings. I’ll vacillate between the two - alternating my shopping schedule between trips on either side of the rue de Bretagne, wanting for the heart-clutching smile of the Marché when I’m at the Jardin, wanting for my fruit-lust that the Jardin inspires when I’m at the Marché.

Perhaps the fun of it all is never really intending to find out.

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grief

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 12:49:00 +0100

Lately I’ve been dipping into these moods that are heavier than my usual ones, which mostly result from the weird catalog of things that put me in a funk – like how I Never Really Know How I Feel About February, or feeling like I’m too far away from the edge of the earth or much too close to it.

These are the moods that tug on my spine, wanting it to return to the soil and be planted there, to remain forever perpendicular to the horizon. I treat them as unwelcome because they come out of nowhere and leave me incapable of putting my finger of their origins, something that’s inexplicably frustrating for me because I like to always have place cards ready for guests as they arrive to the dinner party in my heart.

And then I remember that I’m sad because I’m grieving, which, if you’ve ever experienced a loss, is something that is strange and cumbersome because each new grief is something that doesn’t quite translate the same way as the last, each grief comes with its own set of rules and etiquette: when it will manifest and how it will seize you and to what degree you will be paralyzed by it.

Grief comes as a heaviness in your knees; at least that’s how it starts. You feel it there first, which causes your ankles to wither, pulling you to the floor. You feel it - the heaviness, the sand in your shoes - and whether you’re on the way home from the market or changing metros at the busiest station in Paris, your only instinct is to drop to the ground and hold yourself and hold your heaviness.

I lost someone who was important to me a short while ago.

He was the man who gave me Bowie. I tried to honor his memory by listening to Oh! You Pretty Things and Quicksand and Ziggy Stardust, all of the songs I fell in love with and learned all the words to so we could sing them together and make the same mock-guitar strumming motion in all the right parts. But I didn’t know if it was an appropriate gesture, because I’ve never really felt the need to honor someone’s memory before – except maybe for Holocaust victims I’ve never met, or when I read the names of soldiers who have died in Iraq or Afghanistan in the New York Times: both of which I guess I honor by feeling sad and thinking intensely about how senseless a lot of things are, and then ultimately by feeling sad at the fact that I’m going to die too, someday.

I listened to all these songs that we would listen to in his Jaguar on the way to my grandparents’ house, the one that he loved so much but my mom convinced him to trade in for a Volvo because they were safer, even though I don’t think anyone can really love a Volvo as much as they can a Jaguar – especially not an Englishman. I listened to them – Changes and Life on Mars? and Five Years – until I felt something close to pain, because when I found out it he died it was more fact than feeling, it hadn’t quite yet completed its osmosis; hadn’t yet seeped into my knowing.

And then Starman came on, which was when it really hit me that he was a dead person and not a living one, that his name didn’t belong to anyone anymore – anyone real – but just to the idea of someone who once was funny in a corny way and kind to a fault, who once walked and drove and ate and drank and had functioning organs and whose blood would run out into the cracks of his skin if he ever were to cut himself accidentally.

So I thought about it some more and decided that I would honor his memory by trying to be kinder, which is something I always try to do, even though sometimes it sinks back into my Jar of Unattainable Emotions whenever I’m feeling frustrated or cynical or lost.

But then I thought about all of the things I didn’t tell him, how I failed to jump into the rapidly closing window between the time when he was real and the time he evaporated into a figment. No matter how much I say them now they will still be unsaid, because they didn’t hit his ears and translate back into his knowing when those were things that he still had, because people who are alive can do things like understand and feel and appreciate when you are honest with them.

So to honor his memory I decided I would tell people how I feel, because there is so much I should have told him that I didn’t, and these forever kind of regrets are the most impossible to rectify.

He was the closest thing to a father I’ve ever really had. I’m glad I told him that, and I hope he knew that I meant it – because I never asked him if he did, which in hindsight I wish I had because these are the kinds of things you want to make sure someone knows.

Eventually I’ll smile when I listen to Bowie instead of thinking about how he doesn’t exist anymore except in my memory, how senseless a lot of things are, and being sad about how I’m going to die too, eventually, one day.

Until then I can be kind. That’s something I can do.

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unorthodox friday iphone poetry

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:39:00 +0100

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the adventures of R.F. and the Achingly Handsome Men

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:05:00 +0100

I have this theory about physical appearance. As humankind we are destined – doomed, even – to forever regard ourselves as the image of who we were in our early adolescence. For certain girls, this means a glorified idea of themselves as being the perpetual object of desire, with hoards of sex-crazed pre-teen boys lusting after their early-developed breasts. For others – myself included – this notion has implications that lie mostly in the sphere of the ridiculous, leading to a sort of benign discord between one’s internal and external conceptions of oneself.

I think all of this is to say that I am, accordingly, very insecure.

I attribute this mostly to being a late bloomer: my earliest memory of being aware of the relative unprepossessing nature of my physical appearance was when I was six or seven, sporting a bowl cut and a baseball cap with the logo of my favorite children’s literary magazine (shout-out to Spider), being yelled at by a girl my age in the bathroom at my mom’s horse show, “Get out! No boys allowed in the girls room!” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was, indeed, a burgeoning member of the female sex, and I slinked out, muttering, “sorry” under my defeated breath.

It didn’t help that my cherubic-looking older sister, Ellie, had ice-blonde hair and gaping blue eyes; whereas my face was host to a haphazardly arranged collection of freckles, and I displayed a protruding belly that was a product of being one of those kids lauded at dinner parties for “being a really good eater.”

I’ve always thought that my personality and self-regard vacillates, at any given moment, between that of an 85-year-old man at a bar mitzvah and an underdeveloped twelve-year-old boy at a bar mitzvah. I don’t know why these images of my different internal personas manifest themselves solely within the context of a bar mitzvah, or as male alter egos for that matter, but the best explanation I can probably muster is that it encompasses elements of the goofy, awkward, overtly sentimental – peppered with moments of intense seriousness and existential repercussions. Suffice to say, twenty-two year old heterosexual woman is not my default.

As I mentioned in my post Bromances for Advanced Beginners, my childhood friends treated me like less of a girl and more of an asexual rodent-type creature, which, in their defense, was just their way of expressing fondness. But it did perpetuate this image of myself as a strange adolescent-cum-elderly, which is something I’ve never quite been able to shake off.

And so when I am confronted with my present state of Womanhood, and the physical attributes that accompany this incarnation – which at times, to give myself a little credit, are not terribly offensive – my neurotic personality dysmorphia makes most of my interactions with Members of the Male Sex Whom I Find Attractive, in a word: awkward.

While my recent romantic encounters have erred on the side of the absurd (I’ll tell you a funny story or two if we see each other offline), to be honest, I have had a fair amount of success with men. This, however, is far from the point of this particular essay.

And herein lies the problem of the Achingly Handsome Man.

The A.H.M. has the power to trigger a rapid devolution of my psyche (for a painful example of how this often plays out, read my Open Letter to the Guy Who Works Downstairs).

I can feel the transformation; it is quick, and deadly to my self-respect. Whenever one is identified, often accompanied by a text message to Claire or Sofia (ATTENTION ACHINGLY HANDSOME MAN IN MY CLASS/ON METRO/ON STREET/DOWNSTAIRS/IN THIS CLUB), my capacity for social grace immediately turns into that of a cartoon lizard or a taxidermied hamster - eyes glassed over in a state of shock for the rest of eternity - his final resting place a transparent case in the corner of an eccentric tax accountant’s office.

Example: I was at my fish man’s little shop on rue de Bretagne Tuesday night, getting some salmon because, of course, I’ve been brainwashed to believe in the magical powers of Omega-3 so it’s the only kind of animal product I allow in my apartment with the exception of the once-in-a-while Shabbat roast chicken (I know, I know). Enter: Achingly Handsome Man, who asks the fish guy about the best way to prepare the mussels he was about to buy for dinner. “You just put a little bit of parsley and butter, right?” He began to say.

Fish guy steps out for a second, leaving A.H.M.’s question unanswered. So I decide to intervene in the situation, just because I’m too flustered by his handsomeness not to do anything, so I, quite suddenly, blurt out: “YES”

A.H.M.: Uh, did you say that?

Rose (Achingly-Awkward-Cartoon-Lizard): Ha, ha. Yes. I don’t know why. I just, uh, thought I would say yes. Because, why not? Sounds like a good idea. I like… to cook. Hm.

A.H.M. didn’t think I was very charmante and didn’t respond. We stood in the little shop in silence for the longest three minutes of my life, before the fish guy came back with my salmon. I promptly fled the scene.

Unfortunately the whole thing gets even worse when an A.H.M. shows any interest - which is when the whole bar mitzvah party comes out to play.

I don’t know how to flirt. It’s something I’ve never been good at - I can feel my bone density dissolving by the second, my voice box shrinking - only capable of emitting pre-adolescent squeaks. I’m suddenly the 12 year old kid with sweaty palms, slow-dancing with the obese sibling-of-the-bar-mitzvah-boy with a piece of chicken lodged in my braces, or the 85 year old whose hip movements are painstakingly stiff, and remains somewhat disoriented during the whole ordeal. I don’t know. I lose it a little.

I’ll seemingly be having a Normal Conversation with an Achingly Handsome Man and these are the thoughts that are blaring through my mind:

“WHAT IS THIS CREATURE I HAVE BECOME”

“I’M SO UNCOMFORTABLE I FEEL SO UNCOMFORTABLE”

“WHY ARE YOU TALKING TO ME YOU ARE SO HANDSOME GO AWAY I WANT TO SPREAD YOU ON A SLICE OF BREAD. ROSE. STOP IT. FOCUS. STOP.”

And then what usually happens is that I can’t take it any more and so I just start treating the A.H.M. like a flamboyant gay man, referring to him as “she” and saying “giirrrl” to an excess, and they get confused and start hitting on someone else. Problem solved.

New tactic: never date anyone who was cute in middle school. Maybe I’ll stumble across an A.H.M. who secretly sees himself as a 75 year old grandmother when he gets nervous around Achingly Beautiful Women. A girl can dream, right?

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madness

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 23:28:00 +0100

Within the past week, someone has managed to flip my mind’s secret switch (which, among other things, I keep hidden in a rosewood box under a pile of Persian rugs, in the back section of my brain-attic that smells like yellowing paper), and I have, accordingly, gone mad.

Inspiration is starting to keep me up at night. I make my bed in the morning. Every hour of the day drips with possibility.

My insides are agitated, they grate and collide in the best possible way - I rush around Paris and the thumps of concrete hit my heart in wild laughter.

All this is to say that I feel great, productive, dare I say - invincible - which is something I can’t quite explain, although it comes to me in dreamy threads I can’t help but put into words.

In brief: somewhere out there in this infinite playground, the force of the universe has decided to pick that short, scrappy one for the team - and it feels nice.

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newness

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:49:00 +0100

I’m live from my apartment, where I sit at my table with a hacking cough that has plagued me since the weekend; brain matter that seems to slither through my fingers – held firm only from a potent cocktail of American-grade cold medicines; and an ever-accumulating pile of tissues from the mucus factory in the middle of my face, which has temporarily replaced my nose.

It’s been three weeks since I’ve returned from Los Angeles, a trip that served as a denouement of sorts to a 9-month period of soul-searching and occasional crisis. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I left L.A. heartbroken: wanting just a few more hours or days in that familiar chaos to bathe in the unfettered sunshine, revel in the friendships that have endured oceans, explore some uncomplicated romances.

But things are starting to get back to normal. Classes have started after their long hiatus, and I’ve returned to Sciences Po with a basket of newness on the crook of my arm, which I hope can last till springtime: new projects, new stories, a newfound volition to learn and consume and discover.

I was walking on Boulevard Raspail last Thursday, on my way to work from an appointment at the Foreign Press Center, right off the Champs-Élysées – where the view from Pont Alexandre and the sight of Paris shrouded in grey made me stop for a second and marvel – when I was approached by a man in a motorcycle helmet, who interrupted his concentrated tapping of an entry code to get into an apartment building to stop me on the street and say, “Excuse me, can I ask you a question?”

Since this very phrase has birthed many a misadventure, I of course said yes, prompting him to say:

“Tell me something, if someone came up to you and asked you, ‘what is one thing you want in life?’ what would you say?”

A bit flabbergasted, although mostly relieved it wasn’t anything obscene, I told him that, frankly, it wasn’t the question I was expecting and, well, come to think of it, I didn’t really know.

“Well I ask you this because this happened to a friend of mine the other day – this guy came up to her and asked her what she wanted, and, like you, not expecting a question of this kind, said she didn’t know either. But the guy said, ‘Come on, everyone wants something, just think it over a bit.’

And so, she thought about it for a second and said, ‘You know, I’d like a new pair of boots.’

‘Okay,’ the guy said. ‘Let’s go to Le Bon Marché and I’ll get you a pair.’”

Mind you, the helmeted gentleman and I had been standing on the street for a few minutes at this point – me in a state of quiet disbelief: half at the story this guy was recounting, with a sneaking suspicion I knew where it was going, half at the fact that he had not acknowledged the extent to which this conversation was a bizarre thing for two complete strangers to be having.

“What do you do?” He then asked, in efforts to help me figure out what it was that I wanted.

“Well, I’m a student and a journalist,” I said.

“Okay, so what do you want – anything, if someone asked you what do you want, what would you say?”

I kept saying “I don’t know,” to his insistence that I think about it and give him a concrete answer, so I said, “money.” He then said, “No, a thing,” as if by virtue of us having this conversation I was contractually obligated to respond to his inquiries in a satisfactory manner, after which I would be released back into free society.

“It’s not easy, is it!” He exclaimed. “Okay so let me tell you what happened next – my girlfriend died of laughter when she heard this.

Okay so my friend was suspicious, naturally, and at first told the man, ‘No thank you,’ but he insisted. He said, ‘Don’t worry, I don’t need your name, your number or anything. I just need one thing from you.’ ‘What do you need?’ she said. ‘I just need you to go into Monoprix and buy me some plastic cups.’”

This is getting weird, I thought to myself. I tried to interrupt him and say that I was kind of in a hurry and I really had to go, but he grabbed my arm in an amiable enough manner – as if to say, ‘Come on, this is fun, just hear me out,’ that I let him go on.

“So what would you do – if someone offered to buy you new boots, and all you had to go was get some plastic cups at Monoprix?” He asked, terribly amused with the inquiry.

“I probably wouldn’t do it.” I said, then reconsidered, “Or maybe I would, I don’t know, it would make for a funny story. Did she end up doing it?”

“She did! And you know what, he bought her the boots and didn’t even ask for her name – no number, anything – and just walked away. So what do you want, mademoiselle?”

“Oh what the hell, I want an iPad.”

“Okay, I’ll buy one for you! Have a good day!”

We smiled at each other and walked away, and I laughed out loud all through the rest of the walk back to work. There’s newness around every corner, I thought to myself, you just have to keep rolling with the pavement to stumble upon it.

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my best excuse for recent inactivity, in the most grandiose of terms (also i'm very tired & busy these days)

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:55:00 +0100

Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer—he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. – E. B. White

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i am in an unfortunate period of creative barrenness, turning to the bottle, so here is what i'm posting

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 18:55:00 +0100

“As for now, Foran holds ambivalent feelings about her seemingly bright future.”

-Gem of a line from my high school newspaper, in a May 2010 article entitled, “Foran ’07 works as USA Today reporter”

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this is me trying to give you an idea of what it feels like to go crazy

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 12:58:00 +0100

There are certain things I became really good at as a result of my unusual childhood: my parents divorced when I was Very Young, and accordingly, I underwent years and years of mandatory psychotherapy with a variety of specialists with diverse degrees of competency, as the legal professionals involved figured the ensuing custody ordeal would Probably Really Mess Us Up.

Because of this, I’m very efficient at Talking About My Feelings: interrogating their origins, describing various colors and moods associated with them, linking them back to pertinent events and Conversations That Struck Me. I can do this with the simple precision of, “Show-me-where-the-bad-man-touched-you,” albeit substituting the proverbial doll for my morass of emotions and neurosis, and ‘bad man’ for, well, the universe and its infinite unpredictability.

I believe in feelings – perhaps too much – and the Abstract, whatever that is, and however much I use it to mask my fear of Properly Figuring Out How Things Work. Even thinking about science makes me nervous, which is ironic given that everyone in my family is somehow affiliated with it – from cardiology to nursing to marine biology – except for me, the writer-person-creative-type black sheep.

From what everyone around me who Knows What They’re Talking About says, and from what I understand from religiously google searching “human brain +mystery,” no one fully comprehends what the brain does. We know it’s powerful, we know we only use a small part of it; we know that it’s not an entirely predictable organ. I know that all of this scares me, and here’s why:

I had my first big panic attack in May 2009, which was when I was first confronted with the potency of the Brain, in addition to the profundity of Science’s lack of knowledge when it comes to understanding where feelings come from, and the mood-altering science behind Psychotropic Drugs.

One minute I was sitting in a lecture at the top floor of one of Johns Hopkins University’s oldest brick buildings, my mind focused tranquilly on a historiographical analysis paper about Sartre’s Reflexions sur la question juive that was due in a week, and the next thing I know it felt like my brain was being squeezed through a cold tin pipe. I became certain my body was shutting down – I had visions of my lungs collapsing into each other, the total disintegration of my heart like a handful of dirt – a flood of sweat released from my palms, and I excused myself so I could take my final breaths downstairs, slumped against a wall somewhere, undramatically, such that my impending death wouldn’t traumatize my unknowing classmates.

Luckily I ran into a friend on my way to my final resting place, to whom I tried explaining calmly that I was dying and needed medical assistance urgently. He called the student paramedics – I don’t remember what it was he said was wrong with me – who arrived instantly and hooked me up to an oxygen tank, which I proceeded to breathe out of until I no longer felt on the brink of total collapse.

This went on for about five months: I had panic attacks from a few times a day to once a week – with magnitudes of varying degrees, like earthquakes – that were prompted by markedly odd triggers, things my brain was apparently afraid of even though I wasn’t: shopping malls, artificial light, the sight of pavement at dusk, leather seats in school buses, the smell of parsley.

Initially I tried to conceal my problem: at work I would take long toilet breaks when I could feel one coming on, in which I would stare at my reflection, look into my pores, and imagine everything that was alive about me. But after a while the hiding became tedious – the subtle pulse-taking, the laborious breaths I took to combat my anxiety’s worst symptoms, while still trying to look like I wasn’t convinced I would be dead in ten minutes – especially since I knew exactly what was happening to me, or at least my own non-scientific version of it.

I decided it was time to start figuring out how to fix what was obviously becoming detrimental to my sanity.

My therapist, Vernon, was recommended to me that October by a nurse from the university health clinic after I went in for a check-up, citing the predominant medical concern as, “something is terribly wrong with me.” I had convinced myself somehow that I was suffering from a concussion after having slept at a weird angle the previous night, and as the fear masqueraded itself as reality in an increasingly compelling manner, I panicked, and demanded that she x-ray my brain to check for damage. Fortunately she saw through my hysteria, told me, “we’re all afraid of something, dear,” gave me Vernon’s number, and told me to give him a call. I’m glad I did.

I could tell that Vernon liked me immediately because I was open with my feelings, and provided intricate, textured visuals of my anxiety. He called me “psychologically sophisticated,” which I hesitated to take as a compliment; given the long, painful path it had taken me to arrive at the skill.

We talked for one hour each week, during which time we discussed what could be causing the attacks: Vernon determined that I had dealt with all of my childhood traumas effectively from the ease and frankness with which I addressed them. I had become accustomed to listing all of the unpleasant details of my personal history with the nonchalance of informing a physician of my allergies, notably in order to avoid comments like the one made from a psychiatrist I saw earlier, “It seems like your life is just a cycle of tragedies.” It remains the most hurtful thing anyone has ever said to me.

Vernon and I did these exercises during our sessions where he asked me to close my eyes and wiggle my toes, telling me that the ground below my feet would never feel the same as it did in that moment.

He gave me pamphlets about panic attacks and generalized anxiety, how the condition has to do with irregular serotonin levels and something I can’t remember about neurotransmitters: medical jargon that brought, for the first time, what seemed to be a self-constructed fable of wayward emotions – into the realm of the clinical, the diagnosable.

On my own, I made up catchphrases as a form of meditation – which Vernon suggested I start doing – to coax my rogue neurotransmitters back from their frantic rampage on my psyche: I would repeat the word “everything, everything” to calm myself down during a panic attack, until that idea became too all-encompassing, so I thought, “nothing, nothing,” but that, too, became a watchword more daunting than the one that came before it. I found a delicate medium with a recitation of, “happening,” or “the fact of your existence,” or just my name, “Rose Foran,” over and over, to remind myself that I was made of flesh and breathed air and I was born once, twenty years or so before that moment, even though I was too young to remember it when it happened.

I told Vernon I was shit at meditating and we needed to start exploring other options.

“Everyone has the right to happiness,” Vernon said. “You need to live, and let-me-tell-you-something, you can’t live right like this. I think you need to consider going on some form of anti-anxiety medication.”

A staple thing that mental health professionals will tell patients who are wary of taking psychotropic drugs is that whatever you have is a Real Disease, like cancer or something. Even though someone trying to tell you you have a real imaginary disease seems like the last thing that would be comforting, it strangely is. They tell you that mental health problems are heavily stigmatized, but they’re as real as anything else, and have real remedies that have been proven effective.

“Let’s say you had diabetes, for instance,” he said with the confidence that the point he would soon be making would reassure me, “you wouldn’t refuse insulin, would you? That would be depriving yourself of a cure. It would be irrational.”

And so, reluctantly, I took his advice and took my prescription to a Baltimore Rite-Aid – unsure of whether or not I found it sad or funny that it was the same drug my mother had been taking for years (whatever I have is hereditary) – and spent the interim waiting time for it to be filled at the adjacent nail salon, where I got a manicure and had a small panic attack. I knew it was because of the weird lighting and smell of nail polish remover, in the frustrating way that a parent of a petulant child can identify the origins of a public tantrum, despite it sounding ridiculous out loud when someone else asks, “why is your daughter crying?”

As the sullen, obese pharmacy tech handed me my bag of pills – officially inducting me into the fraternity of children-of-divorce on mood-stabilizers, which I had previously vowed to avoid at all costs – I decided to make myself a deal. I would keep with Vernon’s remedy, despite my fears that it would erase the very thing that made me who I was – that unidentifiable combination of elements that, under the right conditions, equaled Me.

But I knew that my only way of beginning to understand what was happening would be through a painstaking personal analysis of the changes to my mind state: an inventory of everything as it once was, with constant monitoring of even the most subtle of changes. I promised myself that I would gain control over what was happening to me by trying to understand it the only way I knew how, and the moment I arrived at conclusive evidence that I was Losing Myself, I would stop with the medication and find some other way to deal with my anxiety.

So I began to catalogue my feelings obsessively.

I filled my notebook with doodles of what I imagined at the time to be the Human Brain – or at least My Brain – divided in different sections and quadrants, as if I was discovering anatomy for the first time, killing small animals and taking them apart, drawing diagrams of their insides. I drew amateur models of my head, separating the different parts of where I thought my various emotions came from, so I could monitor how they would inevitably change as the drugs kicked in.

I observed that when I was happy I saw grey and I felt it in my lips.

I made myself narrate a panic attack as it was happening in a train station one Tuesday morning on my way to Washington DC:

“I was overwhelmed with feelings of my own mortality, and I think I was sad to know that they would, in a matter of days, fade slowly into the vast abyss of psychiatric remedy.

I felt, I felt, I felt. I stood in crowds and felt my chest tighten while my insides nearly collapsed from tension. I felt my consciousness evaporate as if my brain matter were dissolving.

I almost passed out. My vision was blue-tinged, my knees weak. I sat down to collect myself.”

A few weeks passed until I started to feel differently. Vernon evaluated the changes through a serious of basic questions, in order to determine if I still needed to keep seeing him.

— “Are you happier?”
— “I think so.” (*What is happiness if not feeling like you are reclining in your neuroses?)

— “And you still feel like yourself? Like Rose?”
— “Yeah, I think so.” (*What am I without my darkness?)

As my panic attacks diminished significantly, and then disappeared altogether, so did my edge.

I didn’t feel, at least not in the same way I was used to – the productive tugging kind of feelings that had pushed me to write as long as I could hold a pen; I just floated around between varying gradients of soft light.

But I hadn’t felt like my body would be reduced to rubble for just as long. I could breathe easily for the first time in months; not worrying about one part of me being afraid of something another wasn’t: I could forget the ever-growing laundry list of things that triggered my subconscious into disaster-survival mode. I felt at ease, finally, but troublingly so.

I came up with a decoding system for what I was feeling – as if I was colorblind, intent on memorizing the Real alternative to the bastardized hue as it came filtered through my retina.

“Is love heavy or is it light?” I wrote to myself, trying to remember. Then I made this diagram in my notebook:

What I remember of love = essential heaviness, a type of grinding
What I remember of creativity = reclining in your warm agitation
What I remember of happiness = a kind of biting in my chest

What I feel now = unregulated bliss
What I feel now = everything is fine even though it is not fine
What I feel now = uncomfortable brightness, life through a straw, sunlight everywhere

Eventually there was too much of myself that I had to consciously grasp at to remember again. I determined that my mind wasn’t meant to dwell on this softer plane, even though it was easier, more pleasant. Despite the fact that I was suddenly nicer to people and found it less of a struggle to be content and didn’t have the constant suspicion that death was right around the corner – it wasn’t me. So I decided to take the leap back into my darker reality, and made the same promise to myself that once the anxiety started to erase who I was again, I would go back to see Vernon and devise a Plan B.

There isn’t a real end to this story: I don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t gone on medication, even for the relatively brief period it took to get me back on track.

I like myself better for the fact that I sought help, and put trust in someone who had the skill set to know better than I did about the methods available for combating my condition. More importantly, he trusted me to know my limits, my feelings, better than he did.

I gained a new will to fight for who I am against the mountains of Crazy with which I am now occasionally confronted, especially when faced with the strange prospect of the alternative: my subdued alter ego, Rose Lite. I learned that what I love most about myself is my imperfections, my atypical definitions of happiness, my ability to embrace my feelings as the script with which I write my present.

And when I start to feel it again - the beyond-my-control, world-is-falling-apart-around-me kind of crazy - I’ll close my eyes and wiggle my toes and tell myself that the ground below me will never feel the same as it does in this moment. For the briefest of instants, I’ll be assured that everything is fine. And that is what I hold on to.

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coming to terms

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:40:00 +0100

She wakes up fifteen minutes before his alarm goes off instinctively by now, just to prove to him that she’s a Morning Person – a trait he’s doubted for as long as they have been together, mostly because she requires silence in the delicate moments before the caffeine kicks in: a period she refers to as, ‘Coming To Terms With My Existence.’

‘I’ll convince him soon,’ she muses, as she prepares the coffee: pushing down the plunger on her French press with a force that might be to say, ‘This means you have to keep your promise.’

‘I like making you oatmeal,’ She thinks matter-of-factly to herself, while stirring the pot’s bubbling contents in accordance with the recipe she considers Her Own, as three minutes remain in his heavy slumber. Accidently she emits, out-loud, “My favorite thing is making you breakfast.” She is relieved it doesn’t wake him up.

An image of a picnic they never had floats into her mind’s eye: of her wearing a sundress she would never have the guts to buy, knee-deep in a book she’d never have the time to read, playing with his hair as he rests in her lap. ‘This would be better if it were set to jazz,’ she says to her internal projection.

He doesn’t like jazz, her jazz, but whenever she listens to it – especially Miles Davis’ rendition of ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’ – she puts her hand to her chest as if it’s the essential gesture that keeps her alive: as if the way it hits her, the reaction elicited from the trumpet’s visceral wails, is the very thing that makes her heart beat.

His alarm goes off. She looks over to see his reluctant allowing of the sunlight to seep into the crease of his eyelids. He hasn’t yet Come To Terms. She brings him coffee, milk, and sets it on the tea-crate she uses as a bed-side table. He rolls over. She kisses him on his temple, the softest part of his face. He smiles, then groans horribly as he springs himself out of bed into a deep stretch. He stretches and yells, stretches and yells – each position more impossible, each grunt more ugly than the last.

This is how he Comes To Terms With His Existence.

“Want a clementine?” She says, her legs perched on the table as she reclines in her favorite chair, her gaze fixed on the pink-and-blue woven socks her best friend got her in Istanbul – a place she’s never been – while she begins to peel one, and a citrus mist-cloud bursts into the air. “They’re in season.”

“No thanks,” he says, as he sits down in her second-favorite chair, grabs her right foot and begins to crack her toes, one-by-one. “I’m good with coffee.”

After the last knuckle pops, she leans over to him, checks his pulse and asks, “Do you think we love each other?”

He puts the back of his hand on her forehead and replies, “For now I think it’s more of a deep state of like.”

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ten-second love story

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 22:11:00 +0100

She wondered how he would speak to their children, if their table discussions would be a babelic patchwork, if the beings – made in her image – would respond to her one day in a phrase she did not understand, with gestures that were not her own.

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the girls / the spill

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 16:20:00 +0100

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